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Kier

Devon, July 2018

I’m nearly back at the van when a message comes through from Mila.

She’s sent the photo of me in my bridesmaid’s dress.

My breath catches in my throat as I stare at it, scrutinising it all, the neckline, how the folds of the fabric fall over my legs.

I still can’t process it. The idea of wearing a dress. In some way, becoming her.

My aversion to dresses started with Halloween, when someone dressed as my mother for a party. It was a boy, one of the guys who liked to down kegs of beer and slap his mates on the back between their shoulder blades.

He made a big entrance to the party, all swagger and booming laughter, dressed like Mum, an almost identical daisy print dress to the one she always wore on Fridays with her pale pink lipstick and her open-toed sandals that spread her feet too wide.

There was a knife in his hand, covered in a thick, crimson paint that was meant to look like blood, spatter and spray and everything in between. He’d taken time on it.

When he came into the kitchen and saw me, he snorted with laughter, a weird, ugly snort. He actually called people over to watch me looking at him, said Look, she’s here , did that snorting laugh again.

I remember everything about that moment, just as I remember everything about the moment I found Dad, there on the floor, half in and out of the utility room, Penn knelt beside him, pumping his chest and blowing into his mouth.

At moments like that, moments that become befores and afters, it’s as if your body makes you focus on everything but the really important thing that’s happening.

I remember noticing that one of the kitchen cupboards didn’t have a handle, and how the beer had left a bitter taste in my mouth. I remember Rach’s high-pitched laugh, the laugh she did when she didn’t really find something funny, and I remember the shuffle-thud of the boys sliding down the banisters.

I remember thinking that everything was riding on that moment. They were all watching me, mouths slightly open, and it was an effort to stop the smile from melting off my face like butter in a hot pan.

It’s only a joke, someone kept saying, and I knew I was meant to laugh along. Meant to find it funny. So I did. I laughed, and then laughed some more until everyone drifted away.

I remember coming home and telling Penn, and what he said to me afterwards. ‘You didn’t have to laugh. You could have just walked away.’ He looked at me then like he didn’t get me. He never understood why I tried to fit in with people I didn’t really like before what happened with Mum and Dad, let alone afterwards.

But it wasn’t about fitting in. It was about proving that I wasn’t like Mum.

I wanted people to see nothing of her in me.

Those words. The monster’s daughter. They’d stuck.

What he didn’t get was that those people, the almost-strangers, mattered more than our real friends. My friends already knew who I was, so it was more important to prove it to the people who didn’t know me.

If I proved it to them, then the voice inside me might go away. The voice that whispered in my ear that I was like her, and one day, I might snap, do something like she did.

Penn didn’t get how I had to be aware of every move I made, every gesture that might mark me out as being like her.

I couldn’t curse or even laugh too much. Or be too much of anything.

I learnt to meld, to be a paler version of myself, have no hard edges. I was featureless.

Exactly two weeks after that Halloween party, I screwed him.

The boy who dressed up as my mum.

I screwed him in his dirty room with his wrestling and soccer posters on the walls and cereal bowl on the floor and part of his costume still hanging out of the laundry basket.

As he lay on top of me, I kept my eyes fixed on it – the fake Mum dress, the splatter of blood that ran across the waistband.

That moment, in his room, would become one of my unmapped.

One of many.